The purpose of the proposed research is to examine developmental changes in children's understanding of attention ("meta-attention"). It is expected that theere are changes in concepts concerning the nature of attention and distraction, strategies for attending to stimuli, and variables which facilitate or hinder attention. Meta-attention is importalt because it is believed to influence attentional behavior, especially the selection and execution of appropriate strategies for problem-solving. Since there is almost no research on meta-attention, the proposed research would fill an important gap. Although the emphasis will be on developing valid nonverbal procedures for assessing meta-attention, a variety of response measures will be used--the child's selection of stimuli to expose, prediction of one's performance, construction of "easy" versus "hard" attentional tasks, selection of pictures or other stimuli from several alternatives, rating pictured situations according to a scale, reaction time, and responses to questions concerning strategies. Although children from age 3 to 14 will be used, the emphasis will be on the grade school years. When possible, the tasks will be adapted for use with preschool children in order to examine the beginnings of meta-attention. The studies will examine meta-attention in several tasks commonly used to measure attention in children--"incidental learning," visual search, dimensional sorting of stimuli, stimulus matching, and same-different judgments.